Why cheating? I don't think complying with any kind of "fairness" was ever the point. EICAR was created to fulfill a need to test antiviruses with some additio

Why cheating? I don't think complying with any kind of "fairness" was ever the point. EICAR was created to fulfill a need to test antiviruses with some additional requirements, and how exactly it achieved it wasn't really important. I'm not sure if anybody ever described the official design goals for it, but based on some previous reading it seems that being able to type it on a keyboard was a requirement. I'm guessing this is because the kind of environment in which one experiments with viruses and their detection, it's desirable to maintain physical separation, and so using any kind of media or requiring a network connection would create danger. Or perhaps they also wanted it to be suitable for testing locked down environments where a more convenient way of introducing the test would have already been removed.